Héctor Dominguez-Ruvalcaba

Based on the analysis of a broad variety of aesthetic expressions including novels, essays, dramas, visual arts, and films, this book explores the close relation between masculinity, modernizing projects, and Mexican national identity. The main contributions of this cultural studies work are: a) Virility is a gesture of compensation for the lack of power that defines the colonial/postcolonial condition; b) Machismo requires misogyny and homophobia for keeping its supremacy; and c) Contemporary violence is a symptom of the crisis of patriarchy.

This book gathers the contributions of specialists on gender and sexual violence from a diversity of disciplines, such as legal studies, anthropology, psychology, sociology, media studies, and cultural studies. Concerned with the emergence of new forms of gender violence in contemporary Latin America, the authors included in this book address issues like sexual market, armed men, disposable subjects, and the system of criminality and impunity that prevails in Latin American society.

ProfessorHéctor Domínguez-Ruvalcabahas published a new book entitled Desmantelamiento de la Ciudadanía: Políticas de Terror en la Frontera Norte, which explores the current state of ungovernability on the US-Mexico border. “How many deaths,” the authors ask, “will finally be sufficient to unravel the network of complicity, abuses of the civil population, lack of professionalism, absolute loss of ethical sense, and the use of fear as a tool of control and self-deceit?”

The U.S.-Mexico border is frequently presented by contemporary media as a violent and dangerous place. But that is not a new perception. For decades the border has been constructed as a topographic metaphor for all forms of illegality, in which an ineffable link between space and violence is somehow assumed.

This book discusses how homosexuality is introduced in the archives of Spanish American literature to the point of occupying a central role in the construction of modernity. Dominguez Ruvalcaba argues that homosexual writing evidences how the conceptions of heterosexual dominant ideology are arbitrary, through the study of three of the most renowned homosexual authors of the beginning of twentieth century: Augusto D'Halmar, Porfirio Barba Jacob, and Salvador Novo.